Case Study – IELTS Advantage

Background

IELTSAdvantage helps students from every country in the world achieve the level required to pass their International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam. An English Language Proficiency test that is usually required to unlock new academic and professional opportunities and migration opportunities for non-english speaking people.

IELTSAdvantage began as a humble blog, a way the founder Chris Pell could share lessons with his students who couldn’t make it to class and over the last few years it has been a pleasure for SV Marketing to work alongside the visionary founder to help develop the company into one of the most popular, successful and acclaimed IELTS Coaching Providers in the world.

Challenge

When IELTSAdvantage first came to us, they were following a quarterly launch process generating approximately $30,000 in each launch with very few sales and little income in between launches. After utilising marketing agencies before, they could not generate profitable sales in an evergreen process from online platforms consistently between launches or increase the income they produced in each launch which meant they were dependant upon each launch doing well to cover costs monthly costs between the quarterly launches and any dip in sales during the launch period severely hurt their bottom line.

IELTSAdvantage is very much at the premium end of IELTS coaching providers and the high quality education and personal tutoring included in their courses required a high price point to enrol in their courses ($250 – $799). With the majority of their audience in countries where the average wage is considerably lower than that of the western world and without salespeople and systems available to make sales over the phone coupled with the fact a large portion of IELTSAdvantage audience don’t have payment cards to make purchases online we faced a considerable challenge generating profitable sales from a completely online eco-system.

The Solution

Whenever a client approaches us for help selling a high price point product through a completely online process without a sales team making contact, we know the most important factor we need to take into consideration is how we bridge the gap between a prospect not knowing about IELTSAdvantage to enrolling in a course.

If the level of commitment required to buy is high, we need to offer a high amount of value, and many online touch-points before the prospect get’s the opportunity to buy. After all, sending people who have never heard of your company to a sales page with a $500 product is rarely going to generate profitable results.

In order to achieve this process the first thing we did was build an evergreen 5 day course focusing on a specific area of the IELTS exam most prospects need help with. The aim of the course was purely to deliver as much value as possible NOT to sell. This is critical as our primary aim with our clients is to enhance the companies reputation and awareness, this is not produced by hard-selling prospects but making sure they have the opportunity to buy when they felt it was right for them. Building the 5 day course in a mini-site allowed us to optimise the course for this outcome.

The challenge is dependant upon 4 main factors:

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Driving lots of quality sign ups to the free challenge at a low price through Google and Facebook ads.

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Delivering high quality content and allowing the prospect movement to buy when the time is right for them.

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Optimising the user journey, over-delivering value upon sign up and increasing completion rate

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Maximising the conversion rate from challenge sign ups by incorporating retargeting advert sequences after they complete the challenge

This acted as our main bridge between cold traffic and purchase and could run continuously allowing us to test and optimise the process to increase engagement rate and conversion rate on front end sign ups and sales

The next step for IELTSAdvantage was to develop an online marketing ecosystem for that allows them to take prospects on a journey from first discovering IELTSAdvantage through a network of high quality content delivered through numerous mediums and online platforms. We could send this to cold traffic audiences to generate awareness and build trust and then retargeting into our main challenge where we could then drive sales.

We could retarget someone who watched one of our video and has never heard of IELTS advantage before for 7 days with a blog ad on a similar topic. Then target whoever read that blog for 7 days into one of our mini courses ensuring that we have high quality traffic entering the mini-course ensuring conversion rate was kept high.

Once the process was refined with this strategy we added in more mini-course.

The Results?

Total Spend

Total Sales

%

ROI

The solution came when Jamie was introduced to SV Digital. Despite speaking to multiple agencies SV understood their brand, image and message that GrenadeFIT8 was all about.

After signing up with SV it took no longer then 14 days to get started. The approach used capitalised on buyer psychology to not just make sales but nurture a relationship which has helped to increase sales whilst decrease cost per acquisition.

SV-Digital Delivered A 67% Increase in Digital Sales With A 755% Return On Ad Spend.

How Did We Do This?

By combining engaging content created by GrenadeFit founder Jamie Alderton and coupling it with a digital strategy. Moving prospects along a journey via none commitment content.

Making them more engaged with the brand and when we finally ask for a sale…it’s a natural decision rather than forced one for the prospects.